Migration from Wordpress to Hugo

At long last, I got around to do something I had been meaning to do for a very
long time. I migrated this Wordpress blog over to a statically generated site
powered by Hugo.

That’s 6 years or over 300 posts worth of content.

Why not stay with Wordpress?

First of all, I wanted to move away from Wordpress because it’s heavy and requires
quite a bit of setup: PHP, database, plugins and so on. Markdown based static site
generators have been around for a while and being able to keep everything in plain
text and under a familiar source control system such as Git is awesome.

I use git and Markdown all the time both at home and at work.

Why Hugo?

Hugo is an open source static site generator
written in Go. It’s cross-platform and ships as a dependency free binary. Comprehensive
documentation, wide range of
themes as well as active and helpful community
are great additions.

Whilst Jekyll was the more established solution, it
required Ruby and I really wanted to keep my environment as simple as possible.

Other alternatives lacked features, support, had a more complex setup or a combination
of the former.

We’ve got a winner!

Exporting Wordpress content

The process went on like this.

Exported all posts and pages to XML with the standard Wordpress Export tool.

Back in 2010 I used the WYSIWYG editor in Wordpress and later on I moved to use
the Markdown module in Jetpack. The mix
really confused Exitwp and required me to do a lot of manual editing and that took
quite a while.